In this age of 15-hour nonstop flights, it’s hard to imagine a world where even flying a couple of hundred miles was risky business. But aviation in the early 1920s was often a deadly endeavor. After all, it had been less than two decades since the Wright brothers successfully demonstrated that powered airplane flight was possible.
Yet somewhat akin to the current commercial race to space, the early 1920s was an era of aviation risk taking and sheer chance.
Some three years before Charles Lindbergh made his 1927 Atlantic crossing, a team of U.S. Army Air Service fliers made the first successful around the world flight. Not in one go of course, but in fits and starts that involved an informal competition with France, Britain, Portugal and Argentina. The Americans ultimately won out.
In “Into Unknown Skies: An Unlikely Team, A Daring Race, and The First Flight Around the World,” author David Randall pulls together a compelling narrative of this wholly underappreciated aviation feat. Even those who are well-versed in the history of aviation will find that Randall’s account is revelatory.
The flight was an aerospace game-changer which coincided with the explosion of the U.S. newspaper industry. Reporters hung onto every new bit of detail they could garner during the long westward journey around the globe. Arguably, the only thing comparable to the coverage of this flight in the latter half of the 20th century, at least, would be NASA’s Apollo lunar landings.
The U.S. Army Air Service funded the flight with the full cooperation of the navy whose destroyers were prepositioned along the route to resupply the aircraft with food, oil and gas, parts, tools, even whole engines to keep the planes running.
When funding for the flight was approved by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, the Army Air Service chose Donald Douglas’ DT2 biplane as their aircraft of choice. Douglas, MIT’s first-ever aerospace engineering graduate, had set up shop not far from the beach in sunny, Santa Monica, Calif.
Douglas christened his company, Douglas Aircraft and built his first planes under contract with the U.S. Navy. The early most successful model was known as the Douglas Torpedo 2, a single engine seaplane.
But the DT2 had to be heavily modified to make it suitable for a trip around the world. Douglas increased the DT2 biplane’s range from 275 miles to over 2000 miles.
Renamed the Douglas World Cruiser, the plane consisted of two open-air cockpits —- one for the pilot and one immediately behind for the mechanic. In truth, both pilot and mechanic were pilots, but the mechanics were absolutely necessary because, as Randall notes in his book, if anything broke mid-flight, only the mechanic could fix it.
With a top speed of 103 mph and a top altitude of only five thousand feet, it was imperative that, in the days before radar, that the aircraft stay clear of mountains.
Four planes with eight crew in total finally left Santa Monica, Calif. on April 5, 2024, stopping in Seattle.
The Douglas World Cruisers had a wingspan of 50 ft; and a length from propeller to rudder of just under 40 ft. They each were outfitted with a liberty engine, developed by the U.S. government at the beginning of World War I.
An Open-Air Biplane
Small glass windshields were placed at the front of each seat, though they offered little defense against the elements, Randall writes in his book. Fliers still needed goggles and leather helmets that acted as both protection and insulation from temperatures that dropped severely with increasing altitude, he notes.
From the Douglas plant in Santa Monica, the world cruisers flew up the Pacific coast to Seattle where they were refitted with pontoons on Lake Washington. This enabled water landings, although before the journey was finished, the planes switched back to regular landing gear for a mostly overland journey from India to France.
Journey’s End
When it was all over, the crews had flown a total of 26,345 miles over 175 days, braving mountains, swamps, deserts, disease, icebergs, engine failure, and the vast Pacific Ocean which they were the first to cross by air.
An Important Look Back
In the 100th anniversary year of the first flight around the world, it’s shocking that it’s taken so long for the world to realize that we need desperately new more efficient and faster forms of aviation transport.
That means a whole new generation of supersonic transports that will not only cater to the privileged few but the public at large. And beyond that, we need a revolutionary generation of spaceplanes that would take off on a conventional runway and go suborbital before landing again at their destination. This would enable passengers to make a run from New York to Paris in only an hour with the option of returning home to sleep in their own beds in the same 24-hour period.
Approaching the midpoint of this 21st century, there doesn’t seem to be a ground swell of support either among the public or industry to push these technologies into fruition.
The Bottom Line?
There’s much within these pages that make it worthy of study both for the general public, and aviation policy leaders here in the U.S. It’s both shocking and inspiring to read just how often these brave fliers put their lives on the line in pushing the envelope in this new field of aviation technology.
We need to look back and be thankful for their sacrifice, then get back to work on next generation aviation technology.
